Pat Weaver
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- This article is about the former president of NBC. For the country-blues musician, see Sylvester Weaver.
Sylvester "Pat" Weaver (December 21, 1908 – March 17, 2002) was a former radio advertising executive who was president of NBC between 1953 and 1955. He has been credited with reshaping broadcasting's format and philosophy as radio gave way to television as America's dominant home entertainment.
Weaver worked for advertising agency Young & Rubicam during the golden age of radio. He produced Fred Allen's 1935 to 1940 Town Hall Tonight radio show, and then supervised all the agency's radio programming. NBC brought him over in 1947 to challenge the CBS network programming lead.
Weaver established many operating practices that became standard for network television. He introduced the practice of networks producing their own television programming, then selling advertising time during the broadcasts. Prior to that, advertisers usually created each show for a particular client. Because commercial announcements could now more easily be sold to more than one company sponsor for each program, a single advertiser pulling out would not necessarily threaten the program.
[edit] Family
Sylvester "Pat" Laflin Weaver Jr was the only son of Sylvester Weaver Sr (b. 1876-1956) and Miranda Dean Weaver (b. February, 1877-21 March 1961), he married Elizabeth Inglis the couple had 2 children: Sigourney Weaver/Susan Alexander Weaver and Trajan Weaver, he is the grandfather of Charlotte Simpson (April 13, 1990 in New York City).
[edit] Buisness
Weaver created The Today Show in 1952 and gave NBC the The Tonight Show in 1954, the latter a national version of Steve Allen's local program on what is now WNBC-TV. He believed so deeply that broadcasting should educate as well as entertain that, he typically required NBC shows to include at least one sophisticated cultural reference or performance per installment—right up to and including a segment of a Verdi opera adapted to the comic style of Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca's groundbreaking Your Show of Shows.
Weaver didn't ignore NBC Radio, either: in 1955, as classic radio was dying, Weaver gave it one of the greatest adrenaline kicks in its history when he unwrapped NBC Monitor, an hours-long magazine-style programming block, predominantly on weekends, that featured as high level an array of news, music, comedy, drama, sports, anything that could be broadcast within magazine style, with rotating advertisers and some of the most memorable names in broadcast journalism, entertainment, and sports.
NBC Monitor long outlived Weaver's tenure running the network. Following disputes with chieftain David Sarnoff, Weaver left the network. His ideas were either too expensive or too highbrow for company tastes. His successors (first, Sarnoff's son, Robert; then, Robert Kintner) standardized the network's programming practices with far less of the ambitiousness that characterized the Weaver years.
Weaver was the brother of comedian Doodles Weaver and the father of actress Sigourney Weaver. He graduated from Dartmouth College in 1930, where he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.
